‘A guest on my show painted a painful and accurate image,” tweeted Howard Feldman, a South African Zionist talk-show host, on 22 November 2024. The image, he explained, had been inspired by the ruling of the International Criminal Court, which according to the caller was a step towards “placing Jews in a global ghetto”.
Feldman’s comment, of course, was a reference to the arrest warrants that had been issued by the ICC the day before — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant had been charged, along with the crimes against humanity of murder and persecution, with using starvation as a weapon of war in a “widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza”.
Read more: Middle East crisis news hub
By Daily Maverick’s reckoning, almost everything of significance about the event had been packed into this one simple tweet. In his hyper-local reaction to a news item that had been termed a “legal earthquake” by the UK’s The Guardian, Feldman was mapping a fault line that was threatening to break the international rule of law.
“Jews [and] Israelis have been sent a message,” Feldman noted in closing, “stay where you are or we will hunt you down.”
Clearly, although Netanyahu and Gallant would now have to think twice about travelling to the ICC’s 124 member states, it didn’t matter that there was no sign of such a message in the court’s careful rationale. What mattered was that adherents of the Zionist ideology had felt compelled, once again, to conflate the personal predicament of Netanyahu with the destiny of the Jewish faith. As the ghettoised victims of history, Feldman was suggesting, it was absurd that Jews could be cast as the perpetrators.
And Netanyahu, needless to say, had been leading once again from the front.
“The anti-Semitic decision of the international court in The Hague is a modern Dreyfus trial,” the Israeli leader had stated in a televised address within hours of the announcement, “and it will end the same way.”
In other words, according to Netanyahu, all of the world’s Jews were being scapegoated through him — as had happened with Alfred Dreyfus, he predicted, the French-Jewish army officer who had been convicted of treason in 1894, evidence of the libel would eventually emerge.
As always, from the jaws of what might have portended his shameful defeat, Netanyahu had snatched the opportunity to further consolidate his power. In Israel itself, political leaders from across the spectrum were instantly united in their condemnation of the ICC’s “anti-Semitic” and “outrageous” ruling.
Read more: ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas leader a landmark step towards international accountability
Across the pro-Israel Jewish diaspora, meanwhile, the same instruction had been heeded on the clock. Feldman, it turned out, was merely echoing the sentiment of the South African Zionist Federation.
“The widespread campaign against the Jewish people’s right to exist continues to play out in plain sight,” noted SAZF spokesperson Rolene Marks on 21 November. “History will look very unkindly upon those who fail to stand up for a people that have suffered violent and bloody persecution since the beginning of humankind.”
The hyperbole, if anything, was a sign of her organisation’s desperation. But Marks had also laid down the more substantive challenge of Israel and the Zionist diaspora to the ruling of the international court.
Israel, asserted the SAZF, was not a signatory to the Rome Statute and therefore fell outside the ICC’s jurisdiction. Moreover, according to the SAZF, the warrants were in breach of the country’s sovereign right to self-defence, which had been enshrined in article 51 of the United Nations charter.
Here, the explicit reference was to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. In acknowledging that a third arrest warrant had been issued to Mohammed Deif, one of the masterminds behind the brutal assault, the SAZF predictably rejected the ICC’s “false moral equivalence” between the Israeli military and Hamas. But, in noting that Deif was “already dead” and therefore unable to “answer for his heinous crimes”, the organisation may have stepped into a logical abyss.
Did this mean that Netanyahu and Gallant, who clearly weren’t dead, would have to answer for their heinous crimes?
If the answer was that it meant no such thing — because of the ICC’s lack of jurisdiction or the contents of article 51 — there were a set of hard facts with which experts in international law were intimately familiar.
One of these experts was Howard Varney, a Jewish South African human rights lawyer and senior programme adviser at the International Centre for Transitional Justice, who spoke to Daily Maverick on the morning of 23 November.
“Besides Israel and the United States, nobody is seriously suggesting that the ICC doesn’t have jurisdiction,” he informed us. “For those who don’t know, the State of Palestine is recognised by the UN General Assembly. Back in early 2015, [Palestine] lodged a declaration accepting the jurisdiction of the court.”
The actions of Israel in Palestinian territory, Varney added, had initially been referred to the ICC in May of 2018.
“The office of the prosecutor has been seized with the situation since then,” he said. “In February of 2021, in fact, the [ICC’s pre-trial chamber] decided that they could exercise their territorial jurisdiction, because their scope extends to Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
And what about article 51 of the UN charter, we asked, the right of Israel to defend itself against attack?
“If it ever got to trial,” Varney said drily, “[Netanyahu and Gallant] would no doubt claim that they were acting in self-defence.”
The Trump card
Netanyahu, as Varney and just about everyone who was paying attention knew, had zero intention of appearing in the dock at The Hague. Did this imply that the Israeli head-of-state would need to cancel all planned shopping trips to Paris and Milan, skip diplomatic engagements in Brussels and Madrid, forego all future in-person apologies from Vienna and Berlin?
While the last two destinations, given the ongoing prevalence of the Holocaust in the national psyches of Austria and Germany, were bound to face their own set of internal quandaries, there was no doubt that Netanyahu’s world had shrunk. At the time of writing, The Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain, Slovenia and (very reluctantly) even Austria had provisionally stated that they would arrest Netanyahu if he ever set foot on their soil.
From the remainder of the European Union, Germany, Italy, Czechia and France had issued evasive explanations as to why they were still on the fence. The Brexit-ed United Kingdom, likewise, was hedging its bets.
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, on the other hand, took the opportunity to personally invite Netanyahu to Budapest — which, by any account, was a profound statement on the appreciation for Israel’s government by the far-right populists of the world.
The United States, of course, comprised a category all on its own. Like the opposition politicians in Israel, President Joe Biden almost instantly decried the ICC ruling as “outrageous”. At around the same time, in his televised address, Netanyahu extended a special thank you to his “friends” in Washington, after repeating that “no biased anti-Israel decision in The Hague” would prevent the Jewish state “from defending its citizens”.
The subtext beneath it all was plain as day — Netanyahu, with the probable backing of the vast majority of Zionists on the planet, was now hitching his star to US president-elect Donald Trump.
And there was very good reason for this: aside from the unofficial appointments by Trump of Pete Hegseth as defence secretary and Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel — both men, as Christian fundamentalists, appeared in favour of the notion of a territorially enlarged “Greater Israel” with borders that mirrored Old Testament conquests — there was the fact that South African-born “broligarch-in-chief” Elon Musk, overlord of the mooted Department of Government Efficiency, had openly flaunted his sympathy for the Netanyahu worldview.
Still, with around two months until Trump’s inauguration, and the new terms of high-stakes geopolitics yet to be determined and set, the Netanyahu regime’s moves were essentially no more than an educated guess.
Would Netanyahu, spurred on by his messianic Zionist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, receive Washington’s blessing for the formal annexation of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and perhaps even southern Lebanon?
It was an undecided, if inherently biblical, question.
Moral degradation
Slightly less undecided, if perhaps equally biblical, was the truth of what the Israeli military had been up to in Gaza and the West Bank.
Back in August 2024, the pre-eminent Israeli Holocaust historian, Omer Bartov, had delivered a bruising body blow to the Netanyahu regime by detailing, in a trenchant “long read” in The Guardian, why he believed that Israel was engaged in “systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal action” in the Gaza Strip. Bartov, after careful consideration, had revised the stance he had taken in The New York Times in November 2023, where he warned that Israel’s military actions in Gaza could easily become genocidal.
Another leading Israeli historian, Amos Goldberg of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, had published a piece in April 2024 in what had recently become Israel’s “bravest” outlier magazine — Sicha Mekommit, or Local Call — titled, Yes, It Is a Genocide. After the piece was translated into English, Goldberg’s name began to appear in the more progressive outlets of the Western press.
But nothing, as was clear from the instant show of unity and outrage, was as devastating to the Israeli body politic as the ruling by the ICC on 21 November. Even more than South Africa’s case for genocide at the International Court of Justice — which, as Varney took pains to inform Daily Maverick, did not constitute a “criminal prosecution” — the arrest warrants had the potential to bring the Jewish state to its knees.
This was why, perhaps, in the statement issued by the SAZF, Marks had stated that the warrants made a “mockery of international law”. Again, according to the SAZF, there was no question that Israel, since 7 October 2023, had been acting in self-defence.
“To this day,” the press release noted, “over 100 of [the hostages abducted by Hamas] have still not been returned, giving Israel every right to continue in its military offensive to rescue their fellow citizens.”
But there was something that the SAZF, tragically and conveniently, appeared to be ignoring. Netanyahu, on the evidence of a scandal that was gaining fresh steam, cared way less about the hostages than his own political survival.
Read more: Open court: In dialogue with a South African Zionist leader, Benji Shulman
As this journalist had noted in a feature for Daily Maverick in early October, the pro-Israel German newspaper Bild had been complicit in a disinformation campaign that seemed to emanate from Netanyahu’s office, the purpose of which was to quash a week of mass Israeli protests in favour of a ceasefire-hostage deal.
Termed “Bibileaks” by the centrist Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the scandal had snowballed into the most serious threat to Netanyahu’s incumbency by mid-November 2024 — until, that is, it was overtaken by the ICC warrants.
Equally ignored by the SAZF, along with the vast majority of the world’s Zionists, was Netanyahu’s historical role in aiding and abetting the effective functioning of Hamas. But also in mid-November 2024, Israel’s hardest-hitting investigative outlet +972 Magazine — the stablemate of Local Call — had taken it upon themselves to remind everyone. The piece, titled “The not-so-secret history of Netanyahu’s support for Hamas,” was based on an interview with Israeli historian, human rights activist and author Adam Raz, who back in May had released a book that Israelis didn’t really want to read.
The book’s title, translated from the Hebrew, had said it all: The Road to October 7: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Production of the Endless Conflict and Israel’s Moral Degradation.
What, then, about Zionism’s moral degradation?
To return full circle to Feldman — either it was true that the hidden message in the ICC’s arrest warrants was that every Jew on the planet would soon be herded into a “global ghetto”, or it was true that some serious soul-searching was in order.
To avoid any arguments about “moral equivalence,” it was clear that it couldn’t be both. DM
Read more by Kevin Bloom on the war in the Middle East:
Open court: In dialogue with a South African Zionist leader, Benji Shulman (3 November 2024)
Fascism’s strange resurgence — a ‘bad Jew’ South African breaks bread with the German media (9 October 2024)
Conversations with Randa: How the life of a Gazan refugee maps Israel’s dilemma (17 July 2024)
Holy War revisited — ‘You want it darker, we kill the flame’ (8 May 2024)
Messianism and madness: An intimate hell ride through end times in the Holy Land (22 October 2023)